Unsourced Random Access in MIMO Quasi-Static Rayleigh Fading Channels with Finite Blocklength

Abstract: This paper explores the fundamental limits of unsourced random access (URA) with a random and unknown number ${\rm{K}}_a$ of active users in MIMO quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels. First, we derive an upper bound on the probability of incorrectly estimating the number of active users. We prove that it exponentially decays with the number of receive antennas and eventually vanishes, whereas reaches a plateau as the power and blocklength increase. Then, we derive non-asymptotic achievability and converse bounds on the minimum energy-per-bit required by each active user to reliably transmit $J$ bits with blocklength $n$. Numerical results verify the tightness of our bounds, suggesting that they provide benchmarks to evaluate existing schemes. The extra required energy-per-bit due to the uncertainty of the number of active users decreases as $\mathbb{E}[{\rm{K}}_a]$ increases. Compared to random access with individual codebooks, the URA paradigm achieves higher spectral and energy efficiency. Moreover, using codewords distributed on a sphere is shown to outperform the Gaussian random coding scheme in the non-asymptotic regime.